This 22-Year-Old Designed a "Heated" Jacket So That You're Never Cold Again

The year is 2015, and 22-year-old Madison Maxey is ready to make all of your jackets heated. No more shivering walks to the office. No more shivering at the office.

How is she doing it? Maxey isn't your typical fashion designer. She's a self-described creative technologist, and from the start of her brief but impressive career as a designer, she's been inspired by clothing that can be made useful with the help of technology.

With all the innovations currently bursting from the tech world, blending them with garments might sound obviously easy. But what Maxey is doing is something that's eluded so many other companies: infusing garments with technology to fix real-life problems.

Designing the most functional clothing ever:
Maxey's heated garment, which she calls Kelvin, uses "printed soft circuitry," meaning electronic circuit components integrated into a thin, liner-weight jacket that is still soft and wearable, but controls the temperature of the wearer.

Kelvin may sound sci-fi, but it was made to solve a very specific
problem experienced in the day-to-day.

"We surveyed New Yorkers to best understand
if this garment could have a place in their closets, and commuters like the idea
of being able to wear a blazer in [a New York City] winter and stay warm walking to
work," Maxey told Mic.

On the surface, it's just one more example of "wearable
technology," a phrase thrown around more and more these days as clothing
and tech intersect. Some fashion designers have taken to throwing digital
features into their garments, while tech companies have been making their
devices wearable.

But Maxey wants to apply innovation to real
problem-solving, not just gadgetry. As Brooklyn Magazine put it, "Think less of a tank top that can send text messages and more of a climate-controlled jacket."

Maxey's approach to tech is rooted in the organic way she stumbled upon it.
After launching a line of blazers with the help of Kickstarter,
Maxey knew that she had to eventually learn how to program and code her own
website. The project sparked an interest for the then-19-year-old that would
turn her into one of the leading young minds in the fashion tech world.

"I realized that once you learn something
how to make something, all you want to do is continue making things for
yourself," Maxey told Mic.

She started connecting with fellow students at
Parsons School of Design, where she was then enrolled, who were equally excited about nerdy tech
matters, like how many batteries are needed to light 2,000 pixels at
once. After she ended up leaving Parsons, she tried her hand at specific
projects that applied tech to fashion design, including technology that could
optimize pattern-making to cut down on production time and labor.

It was her first real attempt at an idea that uses tech to improve fashion, and the research for that earned her the
prestigious Thiel Fellowship
in 2013. She became the first fashion designer to win the award, at just 20 years old.

Integrating technology directly into clothes: Plenty of companies are infusing fashion with technological
innovations, going beyond the starting point of making tech wearable
(hello, Apple Watch) to actually applying technology to clothing design.

The most common fixation in the world of fashion is 3-D printing. Chanel recently sent a model down the runway in a 3-D printed suit. On Wednesday, designer Iris van Herpen had actress Gwendoline Christie lie in the middle of her Paris Fashion Week runway while a 3-D printed
dress was formed around Christie in real time.

When it comes to actually solving problems with
high-tech garments, headlines have been popping up showing capes that respond to the
male (or female) gaze or sports
bras with mini vents that respond to body heat.

For Maxey, winning the Thiel scholarship gave her the time and funds to launch her
own company,the Crated,
which focuses on creating second-generational wearable technology — a fancy
term for tech that is invisible, or integrated directly into the garment
itself.

"Second generation wearable tech [is] where the technology is just part of the clothing, and it's hidden," Maxey toldBrooklyn Magazine. "The goal is to create natural interfaces for the clothing we already wear to perform better chemically, structurally and electronically."

Those past projects were about tech being
cool without a great deal of functionality. The heated jacket, on the
other hand, takes things to the next level by integrating the technology into
something wearable, which then any fashion company could use in their garments.

"The goal with this is to enable fashion
companies to ignore electronics, design a jacket they love and use Kelvin to
add smart garments to their collection," Maxey said.

So far, Maxey's working to partner with a few
companies on this, with a selling point that the technology necessary wouldn't
really cost that much at all. She says that the components for turning the
jacket into a heated jacket are around $30; it's just that pesky supply chain and
labor, which is where costs could steepen.

"Our goal is to work with fashion companies
to help them integrate technology into their apparel collections in a simple,
seamless and invisible way," Maxey said.